Greater Accessibility in Analytics: Haxl, Jaspersoft and SiSense

Accessibility has been the flavour of the week, with several big names making announcements which will shake up the analytics market and put greater focus on making tools easier to use.

The main announcement was Facebook’s decision to open source Haxl. Written in Haskell, Haxl is an internally-developed library which makes it easier to pull data from multiple sources. Haxl acts as an abstraction between front-end applications and back-end databases and web services. It allows users to execute a single query across multiple sources, and caches the queries for future use.

Jaspersoft have also been making waves in accessibility. The recent release of Jaspersoft 5.6 placed alot of focus on blending sources (particularly relational/non-relational), and using enhanced connectors to do away with manual integration. As we reported last week, they’ve also announced a new visualisation product, visualise.js, which allows for better embedding of visualisations and support for new chart types.

SiSense also announced $30 million in funding. The money will go towards expansion of the product line and pushing for the adoption of their namesake product, which aims to make large-scale analytics easier to use for traditional enterprises. This is achieved by their columnar database, which utilises CPU cache, RAM or disk depending on what is most appropriate for the task, improving performance and reducing hardware requirements.

The move towards greater accessibility is growing trend; hopefully, this will lead to more enterprises being capable of using big data analytics, and gaining greater insights as a result.

The Author

Eileen McNulty

Eileen McNulty-Holmes is the Head of Content for Data Natives, Europe’s largest data science conference. For the past ten years, they have written, edited and strategised for companies and publications spanning tech, arts and culture. With a core focus in journalism and content, Eileen has also spoken at conferences, organised literary and art events, mentored others in journalism, and had their fiction and essays published in a range of publications. They are passionate about amplifying marginalised voices in their field (particularly those from the LGBTQ community), AI, and dressing like it’s still the ’80s